A Study On The Relationship Between Students' Motivation And Their Preferred Pedagogical Practices

This thesis aims to probe into the relationship between Chinese vocational college students' motivation and their preferred pedagogical practices.It attempts to achieve the following goals:1) To identify students' motives and the components of preferred instructional activities.2) To find out whether differences exist between English majors and non-English majors in their motives and preferred pedagogical practices.3) To identify the relationships between students' motives and preferred pedagogical practices.4) To investigate classroom teaching from both students' and teachers' viewpoints.A survey was conducted in a vocational college,with 128 valid questionnaires in total and 10 of the participants as well as 5 teachers interviewed.The obtained data were then examined and put into processing and analysis.The goals were lastly discussed according to the results of Factor analysis,Correlation analysis, Multivariate analysis of variance and Content analysis.The following are main findings of the study: 1) The investigation reveals that Chinese vocational college student's motivation to learn English can be categorized into three dimensions,namely "Intrinsic Dimension","Instrumental Dimension" and "Situational Dimension".It is noticed that instrumentality plays a key role in Chinese vocational college students' learning English.2) Students' preferred pedagogical practices are found to have six factors: cooperative learning,challenging activities,structural activities,self-initiated learning,practical approach and culture-related instruction.The study reflects that most of subjects would like to have more chances to communicate with others and study in groups in English.3) Certain motives are correlated to the certain pedagogical activities.To be specific,Language Interest Motive,Personal Enhancement Motive and Going abroad Motive are found to be positively correlated with preference for Culture-related Activities.Goal-achievement Motive is found positively correlated with preference for Challenging Activities and Practical Approach, while Performance Motive is negatively correlated with preference of Self-initiated Learning at a significant level.And Societal Pressure Motive has significantly positive correlation with preference for Structural Activities.4) The findings reveal that non-English majors have more Performance Motive and show less interest in Self-initiated activities than English majors.English majors are more likely to prefer learning English in a more active and autonomous way.5) The interview reveals that the most frequently mentioned motive is "to find a better job in the future".The result also shows that the students mostly liked communication and interaction among students or between students and the teacher.But what they disliked is that the teacher just centers on the text books.6) The research reflects that most students disapproved the text-centeredness in class,which is,however,found to be dominant.And the students were found to be greatly concerned with their communicative competence while the teachers reported great difficulty in implementing communicative approach. Based on these findings,the relationship between students' motivation and preferred pedagogical practices is once again confirmed and more practical implications to English teaching are put forward with an aim to motivate and sustain students' interest in English classes.